The Keys to the Kingdom (14 page)

“Oh boy, where I come from, we could make five movies for that.”

“Do it,” Bluhdorn decreed.

At first, Paramount maintained that the second
Star Trek
would be a television movie. Bennett says this was a ploy to keep costs down. But Nimoy was dismayed—more convinced than ever that the studio was looking for a cheap killing. “You know, it seemed the thinking behind the film wasn't, ‘Let's make a
Star Trek
film and do it right this time,' but more like…‘Let's do it on the cheap. We might do less box office but it won't matter, we'll do this thing so inexpensively that we'll still make money.'…They had no creative idea,” he says.

Bennett lured Nimoy back into the film by convincing him to play Spock's death scene. “I thought, ‘It's obviously going to be a much less opulent picture…. Maybe I'll go out in a blaze of glory,'” Nimoy says. But after a test screening, it became clear that the audience couldn't accept Spock's death. “What we don't have here is resurrection,” Eisner said at a meeting following the screening. “We have the death scene, we have Good
Friday, but we don't have Easter morning.” The studio added a few days of reshoots to leave the door ajar for Spock to participate in future sequels. The film's director, Nick Meyer, was so upset about the changes that he declined to work on the revisions.

The studio tested the picture again and the audience roared with applause when it ended. For Bennett, this was “one of the most joyful events of my life.” He walked into the alley behind the theater, where he saw Eisner. Ready for the slap on the back that he felt he deserved, Bennett asked, “What'd ya think?” To his surprise, Eisner was fixated on a special-effects sequence in which a dead cave suddenly becomes lush and overgrown. “That matte shot is terrible,” he said, referring to the effects work. “You've got to fix that thing or it will ruin the picture.”

Bennett knew that Industrial Light and Magic—George Lucas's special-effects house—was having trouble with the sequence, but even so he couldn't believe that was Eisner's only comment. He stamped his foot and said, “Goddamnit, what about the picture!?”

“Oh,” Eisner replied. “The picture's great!”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,
which ended up costing nearly $19 million, had the biggest weekend opening of all time, and its $79 million gross nearly matched the first movie. The studio netted more than $25 million in pure profit. But the film's director, Nick Meyer, still smarting over the studio's refusal to kill Spock, recorded an answering-machine message that said, “Hello, this is Michael Eisner. In order to make up for the rather shabby way that Paramount Pictures treated Nick Meyer throughout the production of
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,
I'm gonna be answering his phone from now on. So please leave your name, live long, and prosper.” To Meyer's horror one night, he came home and heard Eisner's voice on his machine. “Nick, this is Mike…uh…I think this is funny but [distribution chief] Frank Mancuso didn't.”

Bennett had received a more felicitous call from Charlie Bluhdorn. “I'm in my airplane. I'm somewhere over the Dominican Republic,” Bluhdorn yelled. “I just saw
Star Trek II
. Congratulations! It's great! It's gonna be a big hit! And listen, kid, we're gonna make a lotta movies together. Bye!”

Shortly thereafter, Bennett says, his phone rang again. “Did you just talk to Charlie Bluhdorn?” Eisner asked. “I don't want you talking to Charlie Bluhdorn! You've got to go through me.”

“Michael—he called me from his airplane,” Bennett said.

“Wait—he called you?”

“Yeah.”

Eisner backed off.

Before
Star Trek II
was even in theaters, the studio had decided to go ahead with the third installment. Still concerned by the ineffective matte shot in the second film, Eisner called Bennett. “I've been thinking about it and we should not have any matte shots in
Star Trek III,
” he said. “Why risk it?”

“I don't want to be condescending,” Bennett remembers replying, “but if you're saying you can't have a matte shot, you're saying we can't have a special effect.” The two terms were synonymous, so obviously it was impossible to make a
Star Trek
movie without a matte shot. But after a couple more conversations with Eisner, Bennett realized that he could not get Eisner to abandon his idea that matte shots were trouble. He told his staff that instead of writing “ILM matte” in the script, he would use the words “effects shot—ILM elements.” Later, he says, Eisner congratulated him for making the film without a matte shot.

Within six weeks, the script was written. Bennett was summoned to Eisner's office, along with Katzenberg, to hear Eisner's comments. That hadn't happened on the second
Star Trek,
so Bennett was curious what Eisner would have to say. “This is going to be a great movie,” Eisner said. Then, starting on the first page, he offered his critique. Within a couple of minutes, Bennett says, he realized that what Eisner had read was an earlier draft.

“This is the wrong script,” he said. “I agree with you, but all these changes have been made.”

“Who gave me this script?” Eisner asked, looking pointedly at Katzenberg. “I was up from twelve to one reading this script.”

“I don't know what to tell you,” Bennett said.

“If I spent an hour of my time reading this script, I'm going to give you my notes,” Eisner continued. Bennett realized that Eisner was determined to go ahead and, for the next forty-five minutes, listened to notes on a script that had already been revised. Bennett says this display of obstinacy didn't do much to endear Eisner to him. “In a way, it's kind of the same thing as the matte-shot fixation,” he says. “It was, ‘This is the way it's going to be. This is the way I see it.' It wasn't personal. It was regal.”

I
T WAS A
big day for Michael Eisner. The year was 1980 and George Lucas, white-hot after
Stars Wars
and
The Empire Strikes Back,
was coming to Eisner's office at Paramount to seal a deal. For Eisner, getting Lucas was the fulfillment of a dream—even if the terms were so back-breaking that no one else would accept them.

A couple of years earlier, Lucas and his friend Steven Spielberg were vacationing in Hawaii as Lucas nervously awaited the opening of
Star Wars
. Lucas feared that the film would be a disaster, and when he found out that it was burning up the box office, “he was suddenly laughing again,” Spielberg remembered. In that brightened mood, he told Spielberg that he wanted to make “a series of archaeology films.” Spielberg responded that he wanted to “bring a serial to life,” and with that, a collaboration was born. Lucas outlined a story with Phil Kaufman (who later directed
The Right Stuff
), and Lawrence Kasdan (who had cowritten
The Empire Strikes Back
) produced a script.

While it would be hard to imagine a more tantalizing team than Lucas and Spielberg,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
wasn't that easy to sell at the time. Since their enthusiastic chats in Hawaii, Spielberg had taken a bit of a spill with his overbudget bomb,
1941
. He was still the director of
Jaws,
one of the prototypical blockbusters, and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. But there was some doubt that the budget of this new project was realistic—and now there was concern about whether Spielberg could keep control. Lucas also had gone way over budget with his latest project,
The Empire Strikes Back
.

And then there was the deal itself. Lucas's terms were astounding. His attorney, Tom Pollock, and Lucasfilm president Charlie Webber had come up with a contract that gave the filmmaker a very high fee as well as extraordinary autonomy and ownership of rights associated with the film. Lu
cas was to own 50 percent of the film and had control of every expenditure, every theater booked—everything from posters to sequels to a possible television spinoff. Paramount was to assume all the risk of making the film and then give up a hefty share of the revenues before it recouped its costs. “I have to say, for that day, it was outrageous,” Pollock acknowledges now. The Lucas team had sent the proposal to the major studios and almost all of them instantly passed. Even Universal's Sid Sheinberg, who was Spielberg's mentor, declared the deal to be so absurd that the studio wouldn't even attempt a counteroffer. But at Warner, Ted Ashley told his colleague Frank Wells to get the project.

One man who especially disliked the deal was Barry Diller. But Eisner had wanted this picture for a long time and he was willing to fight. A year earlier, he had invited Lucas and Webber to a catered lunch in his office just to request that Paramount be considered for this project. “Nobody else called us ahead of time like that,” says Webber. “I was very impressed.” Meanwhile, Lucas had quarreled with Twentieth Century Fox—the studio that released the
Star Wars
trilogy—during the making of
The Empire Strikes Back
. The picture had gone quickly and dramatically over budget, prompting Lucas's bank to pull a multimillion-dollar loan. Webber asked Fox for help and was stunned when the studio played hardball with the filmmaker. “I've got you and I'm going to squeeze you,” chairman Dennis Stanfill told Webber, as Webber recalls the conversation.

“You just lost
Raiders,
” the offended Webber declared.
The Empire Strikes Back
was finished with a loan from another bank.

At Paramount, Eisner had to convince Diller that
Raiders
was worth the risk. It was a fight that he would take to the mat. “Barry would tell Michael how stupid he was and how his ideas were insane, and it was like water off a duck's back,” remembers Katzenberg. “Michael was relentless. He never took it personally. He'd say, ‘You don't know what you're talking about! This is why this is going to work!' That was the strength of the relationship.”

Despite Eisner's enthusiasm, Diller considered the Lucas deal to be crazy. (Ironically, the studio would fare much worse with his pet project at the time,
Reds
—Warren Beatty's epic about journalist John Reed and the Russian Revolution.) But Eisner was impervious to Diller's objections. One producer, then a Paramount executive, says he witnessed a particularly heated confrontation as Diller balked at making a deal. “Michael defended the property and essentially said, ‘Well, how can I run this company if I can't make the movies I want?'” With that, this former executive recalls,
Eisner stormed out of Diller's office and did not return to work for four days. Diller says this incident never happened.

But Eisner's passion prevailed; he got the go-ahead to start a negotiation. Now his only worry was Warner and Frank Wells. Pollock, who negotiated with both on Lucas's behalf, remembers their contrasting styles. “Michael was like a large, enthusiastic dog who leaps up on you and says, ‘Let's do this!'” he says. “Frank as a negotiator was reserved and gentlemanly, always very friendly and straightforward.”

Lucas's team, Pollock and Webber, met with Ted Ashley and Frank Wells first. The terms of the deal were so burdensome that Ashley and Wells consulted with Warner Communications Inc. chairman Steve Ross by phone as they negotiated. And they nearly made the deal. But with Wells still tussling over a few points, Webber made an agreement-in-principle with Paramount. Much as it hurt Eisner to break precedent, he was willing to do it, Pollock says. The negotiation came down to a simple distinction, as Pollock says: “Frank was making a deal. Michael was making a movie.”

Eisner hammered out deal points “line by line, comma by comma, point by point,” according to Paramount business-affairs executive Dick Zimbert (who had followed Diller to the studio from ABC). Then Eisner would report to Diller, who would do the math and discover that it was “terrifying.” In meetings with Zimbert, Webber started to feel his position erode. “You could clearly see that he was instructed to take back everything that was given,” Webber remembers. “I said to Dick, ‘This is not going in the right direction.' I called Barry or Michael and said, ‘Let's part friends. You're not honoring what you said you would do.'” Finally, Paramount gave in and the deal was done.

All the Paramount brass assembled for the formal signing of the contract. Pollock remembers that even Charlie Bluhdorn appeared on this occasion. So did Diller. “You're sure you want to make this deal, Michael?” he asked pointedly. “This is going to be a great movie, right? We really have to do this, right?” It was vintage Diller—positioning himself close to the project but not near enough to catch the flak if it blew up. “If a picture didn't work at all or was clearly below par, Barry had a remarkable way of distancing himself,” says one executive who worked with him closely. “It was sort of Teflon. ‘I didn't read that script. How did that picture get made?'” And if there was ever a picture on which it might be worth laying this kind of groundwork early,
Raiders
was it.

Diller wasn't the only one who had trouble digesting the agreement.
The deal was like a shot that reverberated through Hollywood. When he heard that it was done, Sid Sheinberg stepped out of his office at MCA and bellowed, “Michael Eisner just made a deal that's going to destroy this business!” At Warner, Frank Wells placed a call to Dick Zimbert. “How could you do this?” he demanded. Like Sheinberg, Wells thought the deal was not only bad for Paramount but for the industry.

On many levels, he may have been right. The studio was yielding too much power, too much profit, to talent. Films were going to cost more to make and market. They were going to have to earn more to justify their costs. And studios would become more and more reluctant to take risks on off-center, interesting projects, pouring their resources into staggeringly expensive “event” pictures that were star-or effects-driven, formulaic, and—notwithstanding a lot of “action”—often rather dull.

The great irony was that Eisner—a man who personified the studios' appetite for control and who made a fetish of economy—was a catalyst of this transformation. But Eisner had his eyes on the one prize that mattered to him: profit. He would play by the rules or break them, depending on his instincts. While his choices weren't always winners, he came about as close as anyone ever got in the unpredictable game that is the entertainment business.

 

SHOOTING ON
RAIDERS
of the Lost Ark
went smoothly after Spielberg got over one major disappointment. He wanted the little-known Tom Selleck to be Indiana Jones—and Selleck jumped at the chance. But he couldn't get out of a commitment to start a drama on CBS called
Magnum P. I
. Instead, Lucas suggested Harrison Ford, who had left behind part-time carpentry some years earlier to take a role in Lucas's first hit,
American Graffiti
. From there, he became Han Solo in
Star Wars
.

Eisner feared that
Raiders
couldn't stay within its budget of about $20 million. “Michael said, ‘The first ten pages are going to cost $20 million!'” remembers Frank Marshall, who produced the film for Lucas. “That was the introduction with the rolling rock. But George is the king of movie magic and thought of a way to do it for about ten bucks.” Spielberg was also eager to prove that he could get a film done efficiently in the wake of
1941
.

Lucas's deal ensured Spielberg that he would not have to suffer interference from the notoriously meddlesome Paramount executives. The di
rector delivered
Raiders
on time and just about on budget. Marketing was a little more difficult: “Nobody could figure out what the teaser trailer should be because no one knew what
Raiders of the Lost Ark
meant,” producer Marshall says. As the film's opening drew near, Diller continued to position himself. In a newspaper interview, he fretted out loud about the deal—embracing and disowning the picture simultaneously. “Lucas has almost everything edged his way and has a very big payoff if the film succeeds,” he complained. “But you can't read a script and love it as much as we love this script and not try to find a way to do this film. But would I allow it to be done today?…Absolutely not!”

The film didn't have a huge opening in June 1981 but it had staying power. Many critics adored it (Roger Ebert called it “an out-of-body experience”). Diller had been concerned because the picture needed to gross $40 million before Paramount could make a profit. It grossed $242 million—and created one of the most valuable franchises that Paramount has ever had—worth nearly a billion dollars just at the box office.
Raiders
also received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (it won four, all in technical categories, plus a special achievement award for sound editing).

The balance of power in the industry may have shifted, but Eisner had created a moneymaking machine of awesome power. “The
Raiders
series, as outrageous as the deal was, turned out to be one of the most profitable things that team ever did for Paramount,” Pollock says. “Michael Eisner—no one else—Michael Eisner brought the thing in and made it happen.”

 

BY
1980,
PARAMOUNT
had established the disparate but exceptional executive team that would become legendary in the industry. Outwardly, it was an oddly assorted group. Diller was as sleek as ever in handmade white cotton shirts and impeccable suits in varying shades of beige. The perennially rumpled Eisner was in corduroys or dark suits that were best described as “loosely tailored.” Wild man Don Simpson affected a biker jacket and motorcycle boots; Katzenberg was preppie in Lacoste shirts and slacks; Steel was a great fan of the pointedly professional but not unsexy Armani jacket. The team at Paramount did not look like a cohesive group, and considering the drive and intensity contained on the one lot, it was astonishing that there wasn't actual bloodshed.

“No matter what the chemistry was, those were incredible years to be
making movies or television at that studio,” says
Star Trek
producer Harve Bennett. “Within the chaos, there was order. Barry was king. Michael brought this incredible flashing energy and Barry would take from that.”

The executives who worked for these two men lived with a sense of exhilaration combined with dread. “We were all intimidated by the collective power of Michael Eisner and Barry Diller,” Dawn Steel later remembered. “We would see them in the commissary or the parking lot and we'd be panting like dogs, like, ‘Oh, please just recognize me.'” To her, working at the studio almost seemed like being in boot camp. If she managed to get Simpson's attention at all, he might occasionally reward her by saying, “Watch it, you're inching toward significance.” When she became enraptured with a script called
Flashdance
—a Cinderella story about a steel welder who wants to be a ballerina—she had to threaten to quit to get him to pay any attention to her at all.

Despite his troubles on the original
Star Trek
movie, Katzenberg also rose quickly. His responsibilities expanded to acquiring films to put into Paramount's distribution pipeline. In April 1979, he watched a screening of
Meatballs,
a low-budget picture starring Bill Murray, known until then as a comic on
Saturday Night Live
. Three other studios bid for the picture, but Katzenberg convinced the director, Ivan Reitman, to let him show the film to the Gulf + Western brass in New York. Diller, Eisner, distribution chief Frank Mancuso, and marketing executive Gordon Weaver watched and agreed at once that Paramount should buy it. The picture, which had cost about $1.5 million, was a sleeper hit that grossed $43 million—at the time the most profitable “pickup” ever. It was a big break for Murray and director Ivan Reitman.